Numerous types of apartments arose in different cities and countries throughout Europe, the UK, North America and Australia, developing distinctive physical and social characteristics related to the rise of new construction techniques, design trends and multi-unit social housing.
English working-class housing:
from cellar-dwellers to terraces and council flats
John Burnett has created a scale of descriptors for standard English working-class housing in nineteenth-century industrialising cities, from the poorest cellar-dwellers, to lodgers and tenement dwellers – all in adapted cast-off housing originally belonging to the wealthy and referred to as ‘rookeries’ – to the more adequate multi-storied back-to-backs (illustrated in Chapter 2), which evolved from efforts of housing reformers. Some better-off workers were housed, by their employers or by private arrangement, in narrow two-storied ‘through’ terraced houses, a form of duplex more commonly held by a middle-class household, and benefitting from light, sanitary facilities and a patch of garden. However, workshop houses, philanthropic and other employer housing often took the form of high-density blocks of self-contained units. Speculative
apartment building was poorly designed, cobbled together by subcon-tractors, often without sewerage, with tiny windows and walls that might be just half a brick thick.1
By 1901, some 60 per cent of English and Welsh tenement households lived in five or more rooms, and more than three-quarters of urban residents of US cities lived in apartments, from one-roomed bed-sit apartments, some serviced ‘catering flats’ through to larger family-sized apartments.2 By 1914, a three-roomed flat in inner London was likely to cost more than renting a four-roomed suburban cottage – probably more due to the costs and difficulties of living distantly from work than with the quality or desirability of a London apartment.3 Meanwhile the middle class considered flats expensive, poor quality and mostly, or even only, appropriate for bachelors, professionals or couples without children who could do without domestic help.4
After the First World War, brighter and roomier English council flats – each with a kitchen, toilet and bathroom – became the norm.
The Greenwood Act of 1930 laid the basis for replacing slums through subsidies per capita, with higher subsidies for flats because they proved expensive to build. Conservationists and ‘modern movement’ architects advocated flats, which increased in number from the mid-1930s.
Typically, such ‘five-roomed’ flats had four bedrooms, a living area, kitchenette, bathroom and toilet. Balconies were more popular than courtyards. Still, during that decade, there were fewer than 100,000 council flats (8.5 per cent of the housing stock). A Mass Observation study in the early 1940s revealed a small house and garden was most popular; only 5 per cent of participants wanted to live in an apartment.5
Given lifts and central heating systems, English mixed neighbour-hood developments of the 1950s included high-rise and low-rise flats for families and singles, with public housing increasingly compact. The 1961 Parker Morris Report recommended 320–930sq ft (30–86sq m) minimum floor spaces on a scale from one- to six-member households, with 28–35sq ft (2.6–3.3sq m) storage of which 20sq ft (1.9sq m) might be outside. By 1969, most benefited from heating by a central boiler yet 85 per cent had just one or two bedrooms, compared with the interwar years when two-thirds had three bedrooms. In 1981, as discussed in Chapter 2, economic arguments led to discarding both Parker Morris and other existing standards.6
By 2014, the mean average floor area of an English dwelling was 94sq m, comprising a range of averages by sector: social-sector dwellings
(67sq m), private rentals (77sq m) and owner-occupiers (106sq m).7 As discussed in Chapter 2, the average floor size of UK housing remains modest in international rankings, in theory making the transition to modest, low ecological footprint living easier than in settler colonial societies, such as Australia (‘ecological footprint’ referring to the amount of land necessary to supply the resources on which a resident’s consumption relies).
The slow evolution of the apartment in Melbourne and Sydney In the worldwide trend to create apartments by subdividing grand mansions, more than one-quarter of the 1200 houses with 20 or more rooms in the state of Victoria (Australia) in the 1890s were broken into flats, tenements and even hospitals. By 1921, only 569 mansions remained. With the Great Depression, ordinary houses were remodelled to accommodate an extra self-contained household with such secondary dwellings also called ‘flats’.8 Still, flats of all types only numbered 5 per cent of occupied dwellings in Australia in 1933, although they became more numerous during and after the Second World War.9 McFadyen expressed a common sentiment: ‘The flat dweller belongs to the floating population of the big cities and is of no value to the community, as a flat is not a home.’10
Indeed, religious anti-apartment lobbies convinced many Australian local councils to ban apartments from most residential zones. The vast majority of planners and academics advocating for compact living com-promised by arguing that they were ideal for all but family households.
So, during the twentieth century, apartments developed mainly as purpose-built accommodation for singles and child-free couples.
‘Clendon’, a suite of eight middle-class bachelor flats in a two-storeyed U-shaped block, designed by Roy Grounds, acted as a 1940s prototype in Victoria’s capital, Melbourne. Each flat had a ‘compact kitchen plan, the glass hatch which left the kitchen open to the living-room, the folding wall-bed and the squared obscure-glass screen inside the front door’.
Apartments designed by Grounds featured an important encouragement to sharing – ‘generous outdoor circulation’, verandas and courtyards, so that ‘even today they provide lessons on apartment living’.11
However, it was the New South Wales capital Sydney that boasted more than half of Australia’s flats in 1947. Australian apartment purchasers would often buy off-the-plan or purchase upfront as shares in
building construction after the Second World War, when governments started subsidising first-home buyers and caused a slump in investment in flats. Nevertheless, between 1954 and 1961 the increase in Sydney’s apartments (28.5 per cent) – nine in every 10 were ‘walk-ups’ (detailed below) – far outstripped its population growth (17 per cent).12
Although referred to as minimalist or modest, as in international modernist or ‘democratic modernist’ style, three substantial blocks of apartments built in remarkable locations came to epitomise city housing for wealthier people around the world. Aaron Bolot’s 10-storey Wylde Street Cooperative Apartments (1951), a building that elegantly curved to the north, established a precursor to strata title and associated common owners’ management that became norms in Australian real estate. Robin Boyd’s controversial Domain Park Towers (1962), Melbourne’s first residential high rise (20 storeys of mainly two- and three-bedroom apartments of 90–135sq m), sits opposite the Royal Botanical Gardens. The first strata title apartment in Australia, Harry Seidler’s Blues Point Tower (1962) was both unusually square and oriented on environmentally inspired north–east–south–west diagonals on a point close to Sydney’s famous harbour bridge, with floor sizes starting from 30m2.13
By 2001, just 16 per cent of Sydney’s dwellings – and a tiny 5 per cent of Melburnian ones – were in apartment buildings three or more storeys high. Ten years later (2011), they had grown in proportion to 21 per cent and 7 per cent, respectively, with three-quarters of Melbourne’s central business district (CBD) dwellings classified high-density,14 compared with the broader City of Melbourne where higher-density housing accounted for only 29 per cent of stock.15 In specific blocks where apartments dominate, densities are comparable with Dublin (Ireland), Athens (Greece) and Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), due to the rise of the micro-apartment (discussed below).16 In contrast, a strong backlash even to low-rise apartment building has been spearheaded by the Save Our Suburbs! Movement resulting in planning limits across substantial urban areas where councils only permit one- or two-storey developments.17
Californian garden walk-up apartments
Sydney’s and Melbourne’s apartments were influenced by US apartment housing, which benefited from a surge in investment in the 1960s in
the Californian garden walk-up apartment. According to Rubin, multi unit housing grew rapidly from 10.3 per cent to 37.3 per cent of US new builds 1956–1963, to accommodate baby boomer renters, studying or working before they settled down to family life at a later age than when their parents had married. Typically, two- or three-storeyed rectangular blocks in the shape of a U, garden–courtyard apartment buildings might feature a pool (Figure 3.1). Some walk-ups were built on pillars atop open or closed car parks, highlighting visual and functional impacts of the car on housing, an effect magnified because of their similarity to motels.18
Although the courtyard and pool might have encouraged shared activities, the car-centrism of the Californian garden walk-up emphasised privacy and personal sufficiency, probably exaggerating their occupants’ sense of alienation. In the 1960s, this type of apartment established multi-family housing in Taiwan’s capital Taipei and, in 2015, still represented more than half of all Taipei’s dwellings. Interestingly, there, this ‘quintessentially modernist mid-rise block with a central stair hall and two units per floor’ allowed for a distinctively collective form of urban living and evolved a unique ‘merging of modernist ideologies with vernacular preferences’, the latter specifically recognisable in their facades.19
Figure 3.1 Schematic impression of a Californian garden walk-up apartment
Canada’s condos
Analysing Canadian apartments (1900–1940), yet reflecting common perspectives worldwide, Richard Dennis has highlighted that ‘luxury apartments were welcomed as evidence of metropolitan sophistication but more modest buildings were condemned as incipient slums, bad for business’ and even referred to as ‘living factories’. Apartments of the rich had fewer private servants than houses of the wealthy, or they replaced servants altogether with efficient modern appliances and onsite services.
Many considered apartments inappropriate for families; close and cloistered living seeming to threaten privacy and morality and deprive children of space to play. Dennis reports how anti-apartment groups and planners prompting bylaws introduced in Toronto in 1912 viewed all apartments as unhealthy and anti-family, conflating tenements and subdivided houses with new spacious apartment blocks.20
Today, many Canadian apartments are rented or owner-occupied as condominiums (‘condos’) with different models of private ownership of dwellings, and ‘shared’ – in reality ‘delegated’ – governance and management of common areas and facilities for the whole property. Con-dominium tenure is not exclusive to apartments but, in 2011, apartments accounted for two-thirds of Canadian condominiums. Typically, condo-miniums are comprised of dwellings smaller than the national average, with fewer rooms and smaller households. Consequently, they have become a popular, more affordable, first-home-buyer option. Further-more, the average size of a City of Vancouver one-bedroom apartment fell 2008–2013 from 668sq ft (62.1sq m) to 580sq ft (53sq m). In 2011, Canadian women were twice as likely as men to be sole owner-occupants, three times as likely if they were aged over 55 years, and women accounted for the highest proportion of single-parent condominium owners. Despite the opprobrium towards the apartment a century earlier, in 2011 Toronto boasted half of all the high-rise condominiums in Canada. Even though the detached dwelling is expected to remain dominant (as in many cities worldwide), owner-occupied apartments are expected to lead an increase in all types of Canadian housing through to 2036.21
Affordable apartment living in Berlin
The histories of many European cities have reflected similar urban development mixes of luxury versus tiny overcrowded apartments,
and their councils led pressures for compact cities. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Berlin expanded block by low-rise block in courtyard style. The wealthy occupied the street sides of buildings and the workers the inner courtyard-facing apartments – typically overcrowded, low-amenity accommodation.22 Since the reunion of its eastern and western halves, Berlin has been characterised by vibrant apartment living, a traditional renter’s city attracting young ‘creatives’
and professionals, initially through low rents.23
German housing policies have included a long-term standard compact with private landlords, subsidising affordable and secure rental for lower-income tenants – one of the most successful national affordable housing policies according to a range of socio-economic and environ-mental criteria.24 Eligible apartments are required to be a maximum size, even though the subsidy is calculated per square metre. In the mid-2010s, 85 per cent of Berliners were tenants, 100,000 apartments were being constructed, apartments for tourists came under greater restriction, and more than 10 per cent of Germans lived in public housing apartments.25
If German policies are strong in supporting affordability – Austria and the Netherlands achieve well on this criteria too, due to their proportion of social housing, 22 and 31 per cent respectively26 – there are still ways in which German urban apartment life could be improved. Hamburg’s Right to the City movement demands affordable living space, shifting funding from automobile to public transport infrastructure and green parks because compact living conflicts with elements of social justice, conservation of nature and common space. By way of an example, Nicole Vrenegor refers to contemporary high-rise estates on the fringes of Hamburg; developed in the early 1970s, within an area of less than 1sq km, Osdorfer Born houses 10,000 residents with just a bus to the centre for public transport.27
The Paris apartment
Apartments were built in Paris as early as the seventeenth century. By the nineteenth century the ‘Paris apartment’ was serviced inside by a concierge and outside by a boulevard, for sitting as well as walking.
This model placed better and bigger apartments for the wealthy on the first floor, above retail and hospitality outlets on the street, with smaller apartments (initially reserved for servants) as the floors reached the top. In St Petersburg, a similar low rise ‘dokhodny dom’, built around a
common courtyard, appeared and expanded with industrialisation. The
‘Paris apartment’ became a US favourite, especially in the mid-twentieth century, and the secure solidly built apartment block set on a main street above retail shops and professional offices remains a common model worldwide.28 Courtyard styles endure in many European cities, such as Munich and Budapest, and are favoured by urbanists for incorporating green and community values into compact urban densification policies.29
In short, the development of apartments shows a mixed history: ‘small’
has been associated with substandard and low-income; and ‘sharing’ has been limited generally to simple access to use restricted common areas under pre-determined rules. However, the apartment is not only a unit in an apartment building but also a dwelling in a larger block of buildings in a neighbourhood city precinct, and apartment dwellers invariably rely on multiple urban services and infrastructure managed, contracted out and regulated by city councils.